After a few months of working out in a garage gym without heat, Eric O’Brien had enough. So for a year and a half he and his wife, Carla, worked out at CrossFit Milford. But the commute—about 35 minutes each way—wore on them. That’s what led them to the conclusion that their community of New Haven needed its own CrossFit affiliate.
“We decided we were going to do this once,” Eric says. “We were going to open one gym—one big gym—under the theory that ‘if we build it, they will come.’”
The theory was proven as people started pouring into CrossFit New Haven from Day 1, the couple says. Today, the affiliate has 175 members and seven classes each day.
And don’t let their “honey badgers” nickname fool you, Carla says.
“It’s the joke: ‘We don’t give a shit,’” she explains. “But it really is that we all support each other and prop each other up in our high times and our low times.”
It’s one big family, the couple says.
“We’re not a gym of firebreathers and super athletes,” Eric says. “We’re a gym of a lot of regular people who work their asses off just to be better.”
11min 25sec
Additional reading: One-Year Reflection by Leon Chang and Paul Estrada, published May 30, 2011.